MAY 26, 2022 – (Cont.) Moderating my frustration with the alien’s interruption was the realization that I’d lost patience and perspective. The possibility remained that the alien(s) would destroy earth after hearing my full exposition on the human condition. Without the restriction of time, however, the alien might let me drone on . . . forever. For me, a contemporary American hellbent on results and impatient with process (due and undue), time was the enemy and patience, a flaw. Time to be “un-American”; time to think strategically; time to take . . . my time.
“Look,” I said. “You’re asking really good questions.” (Granted, at least in interviews of insiders on cable news, there’s no such thing as a “bad” question.) If you’re patient, I’ll later answer them directly, but meanwhile, I’ll give you more clues about what makes us tick individually.” How silly I must’ve sounded—an impatient human telling the patient alien to be patient.
“First let me describe a positive effect of the individual human joining other humans. It gets back to our state of loneliness and insecurity. The most effective antidote for these negative conditions is the company of other human beings. My principal evidence for this conclusion is the contrast between moping and laughing: moping is almost always a solo activity, whereas laughing out loud is most common among a group of people. And as between moping and laughing, the latter is much more enjoyable—and far more medicinal. In fact, we have an adage, ‘Laughter is the best medicine.’
“I can attest that whenever I’m feeling lonely and depressed, when I meet up with another person or several people, the interaction draws me out of my darkness—especially when laughter is involved.”
I noticed that the alien’s filaments lit up the moment I’d said this.
My natural, geezer, Scandinavian-rooted caution, however, tempered my sanguinity. “I hasten to add,” I said, “that many humans suffer from a condition that resists the positive effect of interaction with others. This condition is mental illness, which comes in nearly as many variations as the number of people afflicted by them. For millennia—a human construct of time—mental illness was misunderstood. We now know that serious mental illness is often caused by genetics or chemical imbalances in the brain.”
“Do ants have this problem?” the alien asked.
“Not that I’m aware,” I said. “However, I know at least two dogs that were mentally ill, since nothing else—including hydrophobia—could explain their odd behavior.
“Mental illness overlaps substantially with a multitude of mental disorders that don’t quite qualify as ‘illness’ but run wild among humans. To understand fully our species, you have to grapple with these aberrations that afflict 7.8 billion independent galaxies. Or more precisely, aberrations among one set of the population that afflict disproportionately vast numbers of normal people among humanity.”
In touching upon mental illness and disorders, I wanted to ask the visitor if this human trait had any parallel in other known parts of the cosmos, but I decided to defer.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
